In 1991, Joann Gardner, associate professor of English at Florida State University, and writer Janet Heller designed a workshop for runaways with the goal of providing at-risk youth an opportunity to express themselves through poems. The workshop was founded on the belief that writing poems is therapeutic, that it ''helps students confront difficult emotional issues'' and that ''creative self-expression has value.''

Two factors make this program especially challenging: first, that the teachers work with students who do not know each other; second, that the vast majority of students attend only one time. These limitations, which might have discouraged less ardent teachers, have produced a miraculous outcome: One day a week, in shelters from Fort Lauderdale to Panama City, runaways are given a taste of poetry as if writing poetry were the most natural thing in the world. Doesn't everyone write poems right after dinner and before brushing their teeth?

The early workshops were successful and quickly gained wider support. In 1994, Florida State University began allowing graduate students in English to teach in the Runaway program for course credit. (Currently, about 60 graduate students are involved.) AT&T and Winn Dixie have donated money.

The workshops are structured around clearly defined goals. Exercises and other prompts help the children write specifically themed poems, which are then ''published'' or performed. These poem themes also provide the book's 12 chapter titles: street life, shelter life; group poems; self-portraits; letters and conversations; pictures and words; body talk, etc. The emphasis in the teaching program is on expression of feeling, rather than sophistication of idea or language. As Gardner writes in her introduction, the poems ''demonstrate how verbal simplicity may be used to expressive advantage.'' Here is the self-portrait poem ''Her Life'' by Keyshonda, age 17:

Her life was like this, white and brown, smooth and round.

She is short and little, with a light weight.

She has a crystal point that looks like snow,

It feels very hard, and it has rough edges.

Sometimes reading these poems is like watching an animal molt and grow into a new skin. Here, the author begins with a pleasant image of her life (''smooth and round'') that quickly evolves into a touchier portrait of someone who looks pure and simple as snow, but is actually hard and perhaps even dangerous.

While I admire the heartfelt expressions of these students, I kept wishing for fewer thematic poems and more language-based poems, for more imagery, playfulness and inventiveness. I am thinking here of such basic exercises as the fanciful building of metaphors along the lines of Kenneth Koch's well-known ''swan of bees'' or the ''box of words'' poem, both of which engage the imagination directly, leave plenty of room for high emotion and liberate students from their own limited vocabulary.

Let's say, for the sake of experiment, you divide students into two groups. You give one group the direction to write a poem about their grandmothers. To the second group you give the same direction plus a ''box of words'' - neon, angel, tread, licorice, velvet and Polaroid - for their use in the poem. From the first group you will get lines like ''my grandmother is an angel.'' From the second group you will get lines like ''My velvet grandmother gives me licorice sticks, that look like the tire treads of tiny angels.''

W.H. Auden said that ''poetry makes nothing happen.'' But readers of this anthology will find that poetry can be a way of stitching together the fragile social fabric where it has been rent by the breakdown of the family, drug abuse, child abuse, etc.

''For me,'' Gardner says, ''poetry is a social act.'' She considers Runaway With Words to be ''a political undertaking providing an outlet for otherwise voiceless individuals in an ongoing social debate. Impersonal issues of policy and power ultimately depend upon simple personal concerns - in this case the right of everyone to be loved, to have security from which to grow, to have something or someone in which or whom to believe.''

It is a measure of our increasing inhumanity that Gardner must use the rhetoric of survival to mount her argument. The poet, Travis, age 16, catalogs his ''simple personal concerns'' in the poem ''I Miss,'' excerpted here:

I miss my home

The sound of my mom calling us

Telling us to get up or

''Let's eat!''

Even telling us to quiet down.

The sound of my sister fussing at me . . .

the sound of my dad telling me there's a phone call for me . . .

I miss my friends knocking on my window . . .

I miss my birth mother because she died last year

before I went on summer vacation.

I miss my family because I didn't spent time with them,

except for the funeral, which was heartbreaking . . .

I miss my father.

He died before I was born . . .

I hope that this anthology will be widely read; it deserves to be. It gives us a window into the hearts and minds of these children. What we find there may sadden us or make us smile; in any case it will move us. Without explicitly stating it, this book also makes the case for arts education, including poetry writing, in our public schools. Finally, this is a fine book of poetry. Each of these poems is inhabited fully by its author as it reaches out toward us.

Poet and fiction writer Enid Shomer is teaching the spring term at Florida State University as Visiting Writer. Her new book of poems, Black Drum, will be published in September by the University of Arkansas Press.